Notes on Productivity Home Page

Ed brill and I have exchanged a few e-mails about the idea of Ink Enabling Lotus Notes for the Tablet PC. I hope that Ed will post his thoughts on his blog, so I won't steal his thunder. Meanwhile, I will share one of my emails that summarizes my thoughts on Lotus Notes for the Tablet PC and whether it is critical for IBM to address digital ink in the next release of Lotus Notes (R8).

Ed, Aside from my personal desires, I do not see this as business critical for IBM/Lotus today, but I do see a shift in what users will come to expect in the future. I agree that, in the business, market Tablets are still niche oriented and vertical market. However, the once-large price difference between a laptop and a Tablet PC form factor has diminished rapidly. As it does, more tablets will be sold and more people will expect to use their applications with a tablet.

I find that (right now) people either "get" tablets or they don't - kind of like Lotus Notes. I did not "get" tablets at first (in fact, I'll admit that in 1991 when Lotus offered to pay for my certification, I did not fully "get" Lotus Notes either). My experience has been that if I can get someone to set down and let me show them what Lotus Notes can do for them, most, if not all, suddenly "get it.:" I think Tablet PC's are in the same adoption curve.

Right now, many people, I think, see the Tablet PC as a glorified laptop. I did. Until, after reading all the hype, I bought one and challenged myself to use it. It's creative, innovative, and addictive, (I hope that when you blog about your new (Apple?) Tablet someday, that you'll remember I said this..

So, would I stop the Notes team from working on R8 just to add ink support?

No.

Would I make sure that they understand the possibilities of this platform? [and strongly encourage them to add ink support?]

Discussion/Comments (2):

I admit it. I don't get Lotus Notes. I'm forced to use it in my new job and I just don't care for it at all, especially coming from Outlook (and using Outlook 2007 for my personal email). I know that some departments are using a lot of the Notes features, but my team pretty much just uses the email/calendar capability, and I find it lags pretty far behind what you get with Exchange/Outlook.

I'm sure that enabling ink in Notes would help, but I'm not sure that even that would be enough to make me like it.